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Tag: Dissonance

Since I’ve finished my internship at the Disabilities Rights Center as well as my grand road trip of visiting law schools and the grand tour of the northeast with Stefania and Bruno, I’m taking summer off before law school. With the exception of a trip to Florida for the National Federation of the Blind’s annual national convention this week and the changes to the Braille code I need to learn (more on both those things later), I’m staying home, playing, and writing. After this year, I won’t have another full summer off again for who knows how long. So why not?

On the other hand, I don’t do well with no goals or deadlines. I just sort of flop around. In fact, writing-wise at least, I’ve been feeling like I’ve been flopping around a bit for a while. In college, I was part of a writing group that met every week and shared pages from continuing stories. There was pressure—not a ton of pressure because we were pretty laid back about it—but there was pressure to keep writing on the same project and to make progress on that project, because everyone wanted to know how things turned out. It was lots of fun, but it was also great for keeping me focused. And since college, I’ve been finding that I’m missing that focus. I’ve been having a hard time staying focused long enough to actually accomplish anything—or even to feel like I’m accomplishing anything. I feel so scattered, working on so many projects.

Here’s the thing. I probably have been making progress on all these projects. It just doesn’t feel like it. And it’s too easy, with so many projects, to avoid any problems I’m having with any of them, because the minute I get stuck, I can switch to something else and not actually address the reason I’m stuck.

I think it’s probably okay to be working on multiple projects at once, but I think I would be more productive if I was at different stages in each story—the planning stage in one and the writing stage in another, for example, or writing one and revising another. But when I have three or four things going, and I’m in the beginning of writing all of them, it’s hard to feel like I’m moving forward on any of them, even if I am.

Complicating all of this, I’m starting law school in the fall. Everything I’ve heard about the first year of law school is that you have no time to do anything ever. I don’t know how true this is, or how true it will be for me, because I’ve always found time for writing no matter what else I’m doing. But if I’m going to get any writing done in law school, I need to be organized about it. More than that, I need to feel like I’m moving forward, or I won’t be motivated to do anything.

So this summer, my goal is to clean up my writing desk—figuratively speaking. Right now, I’m in the middle of four pretty major projects. By the end of the summer, I want to be done with or at a different stage in three of them.

The first is a set of seven linked short stories set in my Phoenix Song universe—what I’m calling the world where “Dissonance” is set. I’ve written and revised three of these stories, and I’m partway through a draft of the fourth. By the end of the summer, I want to have a rough draft of all seven.

Second is a fan fiction novel I’ve been working on for fun. I’ve never written fan fiction before this. I don’t have anything against fan fiction, I just have so many story ideas of my own that I never had time for it. But I had this great idea and my friends really wanted to read it, and I was sort of blocked on everything I was writing last year, so I thought I’d give it a spin. It’s been a lot of fun, but I still have a ton of my own stories that have been taking a backseat to this, and if I have limited writing time in law school, I want to use it to work on my own original stuff. So by the end of the summer, I want to have completely finished that and gotten it off my plate.

Next, I came up with an idea for a sequel to my upper middle grade fantasy novel—the one I’m querying agents about. Actually, if I go ahead with the sequel idea I have, it will be a trilogy. Friends who have been published have advised me that it’s not always a good idea to write a sequel for a book that hasn’t been published, because there’s no guaranteeing that a publisher will want to publish a sequel, and you will have put a whole bunch of work into something that will go nowhere when you could have been working on something else. And again, upcoming limited writing time. My novel could definitely stand on its own, but I have an idea for a sequel that I love. So I started an outline to clarify my idea and make sure it is in fact a viable story—and assuming I get that far, I’ll need to pitch the idea to people with a reasonable amount of coherency. I don’t have any intention of writing the sequel yet, but I want to finish the outline and then outline the third book by the end of the summer.

This leaves my memory-wiping academy novel, which I decided earlier this year that I want to expand and split into four books. The first draft, which I finished just before I graduated college, was designed as a test to see if I could write the plot of a young adult trilogy into one book. The answer is yes, I could, but the book was one hundred sixty thousand words—which is way too long if you didn’t know that—and that’s when I glossed over a lot that I wanted to explore deeper. Plus I had a lot of extra plot I left out because I started panicking about the length. And also there were a bunch of plot holes that come from being one of my first drafts. So I started on that around Christmas but didn’t get very far (because of all the other stuff I’ve been working on). This revision will be my project in law school.

It’s a lot to get done this summer, but I write fast, and I’m pretty sure I can accomplish most of it. But I better stop talking about it and get writing.

I am still reveling in the publication of “Dissonance” (and if you haven’t read it, go do so, now), and since it’s relevant, I wanted to take some time to talk about music in writing. If you didn’t know this already, music is very important to me. I’ve played the clarinet since I was eleven, and I enjoy singing (though usually in the shower). So it stands to reason that music works its way into almost everything I write. But for me, music in writing is a two-fold concept, and I’m going to talk about both aspects here.

First for the obvious part, literally writing about music. I’m not talking about stories that are solely about music—though I do have several of those kicking around. I’m talking about the role music may play in a story. When you think about it, music is a huge part of our culture. You can’t go anywhere without hearing it, and it affects you. You have favorite songs and songs you like but don’t want to admit you like and songs that oh my God if you hear them again you are going to yank your ears off. Why shouldn’t it be the same in your writing?

I have stories where the entire world’s magic system is based on music—like “Dissonance”—and I have a novel series I’m working on where the main character’s magic operates through music. But it doesn’t have to be so big and grand at all. In almost all my other stories, my characters have songs that hold special meaning for them, and beyond that, music is always part of the world—whether fantastic or real. It is played on street corners or in restaurants and stores or over the radio in the car. People sing, hum, or whistle, or they tap their toes in fingers in time with whatever song is going in their head. It is music’s all-encompassing presence that I try to incorporate into my stories, even the stories that aren’t about music at all (though it’s considerably less encompassing for those).

This is all well and good, you might say, but how can you pull it off without being obnoxious? No one likes it when authors include singing in their stories. Before I read Lord of the Rings, I never understood this viewpoint. I liked songs in writing. Then I read Lord of the Rings, and I got it completely. I was less than a quarter of the way through the book when I was like, “oh God, if there is one more song, someone’s gonna die!” My trick is to keep it short—no more than six lines at a time. If I have a longer song, I break it up with description of what the characters are doing or thinking or feeling. If there’s a chorus, I intimate that it will repeat, but don’t actually write it out. I also make sure that it is relevant—to the story, to the character, to the setting, something—relevant in a way that can’t be accomplished just by describing the music.

The point is, music is a huge part of our world and our culture, so I try to make it part of the worlds and cultures I create in my stories. But believe it or not, I’m not always writing about music, which leads me to the other aspect of music in writing I want to talk about, because even then, there is music in my writing.

I’ve seen a lot of writing advice given about finding your voice as a writer, and I never really got that, honestly, because I try to develop a different voice and style for each story I write. What’s important to me is finding the musicality in the writing—the rhythm of the sentences and the lyricism in the words you choose. This is why I believe that reading out loud is such a fundamental part of the editing process, because it springboards your words off the page and into life. It doesn’t just show you places where your prose need smoothing, it lets you hear the music of your words, which are the heartbeat of your story. If you can manage it, read out loud to other people, because they might spot something you don’t.

I don’t believe there’s one right rhythm for sentences (in fact one of my friends and I always seem to have just slightly different ideas of what sounds good to us). I don’t believe that only certain styles produce lyrical prose. I don’t even believe that lyrical prose is always called for. But I do believe that music and writing are not separate entities. I believe that they are, in fact, so tightly entangled in each other that it would be difficult to separate them. Even if you aren’t writing about music, the music is in the writing.

It is here! And it is not an April Fools joke! My short story “Dissonance” has been published in Abyss and Apex. Go read it here. I hope you enjoy, and if you do enjoy, please share it.

And after you’ve read the story, if you’re curious about where the idea came from, what revisions I made, and other fun facts, check out this page. Bonus: you’ll get to see my own illustration of the story.